Research team's mask strategy passes muster
Tests show harness makes surgical masks just as good as N95 in stopping aerosol droplets

Date:
February 7, 2022
Source:
Rice University
Summary:
During the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, a research team
went looking for and found a way to make standard surgical masks
better at keeping out small airborne droplets that might contain
the SARS-CoV- 2 virus.



FULL STORY ========================================================================== Masks to protect people from illness come in all shapes and sizes.

Unfortunately.


========================================================================== During the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, a team at Rice
University's George R. Brown School of Engineering and the University of
Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center went looking for and found a way to make standard surgical masks better at keeping out small airborne droplets
that might contain the SARS-CoV- 2 virus.

They came up with an easily manufactured adhesive silicone harness that
allows light surgical masks to match and sometimes exceed the federal
safety standards for N95 and KN95 masks.

A study led by Jeannette Ingabire, a Systems, Synthetic and Physical
Biology graduate student in the Rice lab of electrical and computer
engineer Jacob Robinson, appears in JAMA Network Open, part of the
American Medical Association group of journals.

The team won a small grant in the first round of awards from Rice's
COVID-19 Research Fund to make surgical masks better suited to the
crisis. "N95s were hard to get at the time, so it seemed logical
to improve the flimsy surgical masks you see in hospitals," Robinson
said. "Now, of course, good masks are easier to get, but you never know
when our solution will be needed." The project began when co-author
Dr. Sahil Kapur, an assistant professor in the Department of Plastic
Surgery at MD Anderson, approached Rice engineers with an idea for a
harness to make surgical masks fit more snuggly around the face.



========================================================================== Based on Kapur's concept, Rice's Caleb Kemere, an associate professor
of electrical and computer engineering and of bioengineering, designed
several concepts, tried them on himself and determined they could be
laser-cut from a single sheet of elastomer.

Ingabire and the Rice team 3D-printed mannequin heads of different shapes
and sizes as specified by federal regulations. Once they assured proper
fit with the mannequins, Ingabire and Hannah McKenney, a Rice alumna now
at MD Anderson, recruited more than three dozen COVID-negative volunteers
from among "essential personnel" at the institutions to judge the masks
for comfort and sit for airflow tests with an infrared camera.

The camera quickly revealed where air was leaking in and out of
ill-fitting masks -- most often near the nose and eyes -- leading to a
revision of the harness.

The team's version 2.1 closed the gaps for most wearers by widening the
harness along the slope of the nose while reducing the amount of material overall to preserve the wearer's field of view. The rubbery harnesses
give the mask more of the form of an N95, with better sealing than the
surgical mask alone.

"That was a suggestion from clinicians at MD Anderson who told us if
something is really big, it can interfere with a surgeon's eyesight,"
Ingabire said. "So the final version fits more snugly around your
nose. If you want people to use something for a long time, it has to be comfortable." The revised harness/mask combo easily passed a "filtering facepiece respirator" evaluation that proved them to be 15 times better at stopping droplets than surgical masks alone. Though the masks themselves
are single-use, the harnesses can be removed, sanitized and used again, Ingabire said.

She said some of the volunteers were impressed enough to keep their
harnesses.

"A few grabbed some," she laughed. "When they saw they passed the same fit
test they use to evaluate an N95 in a hospital, they said, 'Can I have
this?'" Co-authors of the paper include Rice alumnus Krishna Badhiwala
and postdoctoral researcher Charles Sebesta. Robinson is an associate
professor of electrical and computer engineering and of bioengineering.

========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by Rice_University. Original written
by Mike Williams. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.


========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. Jeannette Ingabire, Hannah McKenney, Charles Sebesta, Krishna
Badhiwala,
Caleb Kemere, Sahil Kapur, Jacob T. Robinson. Evaluation of Aerosol
Particle Leak and Standard Surgical Mask Fit With 3 Elastomeric
Harness Designs. JAMA Network Open, 2022; 5 (1): e2145811 DOI:
10.1001/ jamanetworkopen.2021.45811 ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/02/220207155705.htm

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